Monday, February 10, 2014

Sexism & Stress: A Response

The link
between the experience of racism and stress is evident. Social factors in our
environment can have real, permanent consequences on our health over a
lifetime. And unlike a zebra, not only do we experience moments of intense
social stress, but we also have the ability to replay them over and over again
in our minds long after the fact.

Sitting up in bed, I
wondered: If you can induce depression in animals with electric shocks, can you
induce depression in women by demeaning them, belittling their efforts,
creating unattainable images and goals for them to aspire to? If you repeatedly follow the advice in
magazines and books about how to have it all and you keep failing, will you
start to feel powerless?...And, what if you are also low on the socioeconomic
ladder, what if you are a woman and poor?

And what if you’re a woman of color? These everyday
stressors and casual microaggressions add up, and over time, it becomes increasingly
difficult not to “sweat the small stuff.”

As with the effects of racism on health, we know what the
problems are: the glass ceiling, lack of equal pay, being expected to excel in
work and in caring for a family—those
are the obvious ones. There’s also the fact that simply by growing up in a
culture that assumes male as the default (like how engineers are assumed to be
men in the Volkswagen
Super Bowl Ad this year) women can often feel as though they don’t belong
in their career and may feel instead as if they are an especially gifted faker
(this is called the Impostor
Syndrome, fyi).